


Weavers

by Voidflower



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Evolution of the Unchanging Powers, Gen, Halls of Mandos, So Much Speculation, The Valar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 18:44:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11903910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Voidflower/pseuds/Voidflower
Summary: Vairë weaves the Quenta Þerindion.





	Weavers

I am meant to be impartial. I am the Weaver, the wife of the Doomsman, and we are wed in pitilessness.

But we Valar, even we Unfallen, have our irregularities. I begin to think that to live in Arda Marred is to drop stiches in one’s own nature. Too long beneath Laurelin’s last and blighted flower fades even the best-dyed cloth, and the pull of the bones of Arda drags on my tapestries, distorting their dimensions, stretching them ever-thinner.

I have accepted this—that even in Aman my work will never retain perfect semblance of the Song—and in my acceptance I have found a kind of freedom. Perhaps this is part of the Gift of Men, and I transgress my appointed place, but who among the living, even of the Powers, descends into my Halls? Who among the dead will fault me for turning my eye and hand to those I favor? Have not they all done the same, and come to grief for it here?

I am still unsuited to pity, it is true, but I have learned partiality. When Míriel Þerinde came to me, she followed her son in thought to Beleriand, tracing his every misdeed and overthrow. Most of the tapestries that recount his deeds are hers alone, in fact. There is a scene of her son amid the wreckage of Formenos, and the bright edges of shadows cast by the lamps across the floor are woven in her own hair. It is not written that an Elda should record the history of her own people in the Halls, but she would not be dissuaded. Even when she could barely recognize that flame-eyed vengeful creature as her own beloved son, she stayed, and she watched, and she followed to his end. I did not understand, then.

Now Þerinde leads her son’s bright fëa through the Halls, and he sits at her feet while she picks out tales of clever Easterling women leveraging husbands of their own choosing and Númenórean shepherdesses dancing alone under the stars and girls of the Far East who make beautiful cloth out of the coverings of worms, which they boil to death before shredding their cocoons. Her son bows his head and waits for the End of Days while she strokes his silky hair.

I would have left the doings of the son’s quarrelsome offspring to the impersonal spinning of my Loom, but it did not seem right to leave the story Míriel had so carefully tended to be swallowed up by pitiless circumstance—a disreputable blood-red thread in the background of Arda’s Marring. So I took upon myself a body, made in the likeness of Þerinde, and I wove the ruin of her lineage with all the care and attention a world-maker can bring to bear against world-breakers.

I even bent my pride enough to ask my sister-in-law for instruction in the ways of pity and compassion, once it became clear that there would be little to love for their own sake in the grandsons of Þerinde. It was an uneasy lesson for one whose nature it is to see and to record only, and I suspect even Nienna’s long patience was sorely tried. She wept over the maiming of the well-formed one; I merely admired the balance of his matted coppery hair against the soft iridescent brown of Sorontar. She must have despaired of me. But I wove and wove, rejoicing in every tangle and rip and ache in my body’s fingers, reveling in the raw wool and flax of Arda. Never had I felt so close to my subjects. Never had I seen the Children as aught other than shapes to be woven. But through all the long years of the Exile, I learned to feel the pain of the sons of Míriel’s son. As surely as I had woven them, they had enmeshed me. Following their threads, fraying and burnt-off and hopelessly entangled, I beheld the whole of the overthrow of Beleriand.

The little-father sank deep into bitterness and spite, leaning on his brother’s feral energy for momentum where once he had felt the rhythm of the forge. The last time the skilled son of the son of Míriel put away his tools, I called on Aulë to witness it. In his thought, I read the magnitude of that loss, and I remembered.

When the brother, the hasty-hearted hunter, locked away the daughter of Melyanna, I called on Oromë to understand. “He always hated nothing more than a cage,” said the Huntsman, and looked away.

The red-faced one, he was a weaver like Míriel, and perhaps I would have called him my favorite, if such a thing were in my nature. But I admired his craft and his passion and even his high temper, until all three were snuffed out in Melian’s deserted halls. The sorrow of that overthrow was perhaps not wholly Nienna’s. He still seeks seclusion, but when he emerges, I believe I will offer him a place at my side.

In death, the twins lay tangled together so tightly I wove their forms from one thread. The two oldest drew together into a gnarled knot, barely quendë-shaped, and when the oldest cut his own thread, the bard unraveled. He still trails broken strands behind him. I believe he knows I am watching; or why else would he sing?

While he wanders, my great labor for the sake of Míriel will never rest. I cannot tie off the last tapestry until the gold-cleaver returns to Valinor from his long wanderings… but perhaps I do not want to. Maybe I will thank him, at the end.

I am not an embroiderer; I do not embellish. But I had grown fond of my little Weaver, and for her sake I resolved to make the ugliness and shattered promise of her son’s legacy into something that pricked with beauty as much as pain. I did not undertake this story-making lightly; Arda was Sung, and to create is the heaviest thing in Eä, for it is the backing and the frame and the warp of all that is. So, I took my thought to Taniquetil. From Manwë I learned the shape of words and tales. But from Elbereth, I learned that a dark expanse, the yawning dome of heaven, can spring forth into heart-shivering beauty from the presence of a few faithful jewels flickering amid the emptiness. That, she told me, is the substance of hope. That is why she set the Valacirca in the North, why Menelmacar stands ready for the Dagorath, why that thrice-taken jewel of Míriel’s child yet burns as the Gil-estel.

From Varda I learned I need not embellish; only capture the tiny spots of hope that already lingered in the margins of my story, and connect them.

So I sat down again before my work, this time with silver thread-of-gold.

_And Finrod walks with Finarfin his father beneath the trees in Valinor._

_And great was their beauty and bliss ere they perished._

_And Celebrimbor repudiated the deeds of his father and uncle._

_And great love grew between them, as little might be thought._

_And from me and from you a new star shall arise._

So, here ends the Quenta Þerindion. If it has passed from the high and beautiful into darkness and ruin, that is beyond the scope of needlecraft to amend, for I have ringed each misery with stars and can do no more. Vairë the Weaver knows not if any change is to come, but I would not see these tapestries of slow ruin pass out of memory, even were our bliss renewed as if the darkness had never been. That, I think, would be a lesser weaving, and a betrayal of my Art.

**Author's Note:**

> Quenya word construction? Who is that?
> 
> Anyway, Vairë fascinates me. She's a record-keeper, a historian, and therefore meant to be objective... and yet, she is a Maker. She weaves, and visual representation of events inevitably requires subjective inference. So, like. WTF is Vairë weaving? I mean, likely she's operating on a plane unreachable by the finite mind, and weaving is just the closest metaphorical representation of what she does, but I like to think the Valar are more entangled with the limitations of the "earthly" versions of their craft than that. After all, the distinguishing feature of the Valar--as opposed to the Ainur in general--is that they have bound themselves to the world and its substance. They can't be completely metaphysical/conceptual/unified in nature. They have to change, right? Like everything that inhabits Time?
> 
> Anyway have this speculation-fest disguised as fic. Please yell at me about the Valar if you have any thought; this is what I live for.


End file.
